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Last week Skype announced a design competition asking designers to submit chat styles for their recently released and somewhat controversial Skype 5 client. The new interface design had been in open beta for a few months, and featured a consolidated single window with a contacts sidebar, and a default style that had a frankly rather ridiculous amount of padding on nearly every element.

Web design is full of problems looking for solutions. Unfortunately too many designers (and clients) forget or ignore the problem they are trying to solve, and instead focus on just the aesthetics instead of looking at the bigger picture of what the site is trying to achieve. This should cause us to start asking ourselves what our role as “designer” is exactly.

“Setting aside whether the aesthetic or style of my design is particularly original or not, I have a way of solving design problems that’s predictable, at least. For better or worse, there are certain tropes, tendencies, tricks and clichés that I repeatedly enlist in the pursuit of a design solution. I thought to myself the other day, wouldn’t it be fun to list them all out?”

Following in the footsteps of Khoi and Shaun Inman, here’s my introspective on 5 common elements that define my style